Month: February 2015

Iowa Renewal Project event offered free to Iowa's faithful An invitation, stamped with the return address of a West Des Moines UPS Store mailbox, went out this week to Iowa’s faithful. Those who received the call will have an opportunity to hear privately from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Iowa Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds and various other conservative leaders at a two-day, all-expenses-paid Pastors Policy Briefing scheduled for March 9 and 10 in Des Moines. “Meals and lodging are complimentary and will be provided by the Iowa Renewal Project,” reads the invitation. It is hardly the first time a Pastors Policy Briefing has been held in Iowa or other states key to the presidential nomination process. The closed-door meetings have been a shadowy part of the…

Ask people in Iowa City whether or not the 21-only ordinance is working, and the answers will be a mixed bag. Nearly five years and two ballot referendums later, the issue of whether adults under the age of 21 should be allowed in most drinking establishments after 10 p.m. remains hotly contested. Those who support the ordinance point to statistics comparing the three years before and after the ordinance went into effect. There were drops in the number of citations for underage people caught in possession of alcohol and arrests for driving under the influence. But there also has been a significant increase in disorderly house citations, which skeptics hold as evidence that the root problem (underage drinking) still is thriving behind closed doors. Medical calls related to heavy alcohol consumption have…

Valentine’s Day is upon us again. It is what I consider a fairly useless holiday, filled as it often is with the vestiges of naive love. Enduring love has little to do with heart-shaped candies and red-inked greeting cards. The type of love that lasts, that matters, doesn’t lend itself well to poetry or song lyrics. Love, at least by my way of thinking, is understanding faults and working to better them. Love is seeing and knowing it all — moments of selfishness, flashes of insecurity, flights of boastfulness — and believing life would be less without the shortcomings. Such thoughts have been on my mind throughout the week as I considered what might fill this column. But on Tuesday, a particularly frustrating day, I set them aside. My daughter…

Those living with mental illness asked to speak up, break stigma Sit down and have a conversation with Iowa City blogger Brook Easton and you won’t walk away with the impression that she is a person coping with health challenges. And, frankly, that’s the point. Easton, a wife and mom of two boys, is like so many others — a quarter of all Americans, according to national studies — who live with a mental illness. It’s a challenge she knows well, one that she shares with her father and a son. “So many times, to a person seeing only the outside, it is invisible,” she said. “People see someone holding down a job or going to school. What they can’t see is what is happening inside that person’s head.” And,…

We are not beyond stigmatizing health problems My sister-in-law, Susan, one of the strongest people I’ve ever met, couldn’t fight off a blood infection. She juggled not only my brother — a lifelong minister too often focused on lofty pursuits to be bogged down in the daily chores of living — but five children as well. We buried Susan a few weekends ago and it was, as you might expect, an emotional ceremony. At the same time Susan was in the hospital, another mother decided her life was no longer worth living. Beckie, who battled mental illness, first turned a rifle on her two adult sons before contacting a relative to say goodbye. By the time law enforcement was alerted and arrived at the rural home, all three were dead. The two…

When you think about violence against law enforcement, you probably don’t turn a suspicious eye to your smartphone. But some police advocates are doing just that. Waze, a navigation app, has drawn the ire of some police officers who believe its “cop-tracking” capabilities pose a threat. I’ve been a happy Waze user for several years, long before it was purchased by Google in 2013 for $966 million. The app works like most other navigation programs, showing drivers the way from Point A to Point B, but it also crowdsources real-time driving data based on traffic flow and road hazards. If you hate driving through a larger city at rush hour, need to arrive at your destination by the quickest route possible or want to avoid traffic cameras, Waze will be your best…